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Two of the most influential books in the innovation field are "The Innovator's Dilemma" and the "The Innovator's Solution." "Dilemma" outlined the sometimes counter-intuitive conundrum of innovation and "Solution" provided ideas for how to handle the complexities of innovation.

Michael Raynor, co-author of "The Innovator's Solution" with Clayton Christensen is a keynote speaker at "Unblocking Innovation," the 11th annual Convergence of people, ideas and great practices related to innovation to be held in Minneapolis, September 21-23.

After observing numerous successful and unsuccessful companies, Raynor and his co-author, Clayton Christensen, theorized that innovation is a process that can best be realized in a four-step approach:

1. Identify overshoot: When an industry-leading product enters the mature phase of its lifecycle, it reaches a point where it improves past the expectations and needs of consumers. Unwilling to pay the extra money for extra features they don’t need, customers are open to cheaper or easier-to-use products ... the problem is, these products don’t exist.

2. Find a foothold: Once slivers of the market’s needs are unfulfilled, a disruptive company comes up with something to fill that hole. In "low-end disruption," this can be a cheaper, inferior product targeted at the current incumbent’s lower-end consumers who are willing to pay less money for less quality. In "new market disruption," this means altering a product to better suit a new market that is not being addressed by the current incumbent.

3. Improve what matters: As the new product begins its lifecycle, it has to get better while keeping in mind the needs of its consumers. This usually means improving quality while keeping costs low.

4. Catch up with the needs of mainstream consumers: Eventually, a disruptive company develops until it reaches a point of contention with the product leader. Its disruptive business model gives the new company the power to surpass the old one.

A brilliant and galvanizing speaker, Raynor is a uniquely qualified expert on creating and sustaining business growth. In addition to his work with Christensen, he is a director for Deloitte, the global profesional services firm, and part of Deloitte Research, the thought leadership arm of Deloitte. He has a great depth of experience and theoretical understanding of the innovation field and will share best practices from around the world with Convergence participants.

What if models for new revenue streams or cost-cutting measures were sitting right in front of you waiting for you to be able to see them? According to nature writer Janine Benyus, answers are all around us ... we just need to look to nature for models.

If you attend "Unlocking Innovation," the eleventh annual Convergence of people, ideas and great practices related to innovation, you will hear Janine, who coined the term "biomimicry" and wrote the book of the same title, tell you exactly how this new way of looking at nature is helping people solve important problems.

In an interview for "Interiors & Sources" magazine, author Penny Bonda states, "She's (Benyus) brought biologists, industrialists, inventors and designers together at the drawing board ... and convinced commercial giants to alter the way they look at product development and manufacturing."

A self-described "nature-nerd," Benyus suggests that we focus on new questions such as ...

-- How does life make things?

-- How does life make the most of things?

-- How does like make things disappear into systems?

Biomimicry example: Traditional hearing aids do not do a very good job of detecting the direction of sounds, thus handicapping their users. Biomimicry suggests that a solution to this conundrum would be found in nature by studying organisms that depend on sound direction for their survival, such as the ormia fly that feeds off crickets and needs to locate them by their sounds. An analysis of the fly's hearing mechanisms became the basis for a whole new kind of hearing aid.

From biomimicry.net: "Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a new science that studies nature's best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems. Studying a leaf to invent a better solar cell is an example. I think of it as "innovation inspired by nature."

"The core idea is that nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth. This is the real news of biomimicry: After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.

"Like the viceroy butterfly imitating the monarch, we humans are imitating the best and brightest organisms in our habitat. We are learning, for instance, how to harness energy like a leaf, grow food like a prairie, build ceramics like an abalone, self-medicate like a chimp, compute like a cell, and run a business like a hickory forest.

"The conscious emulation of life's genius is a survival strategy for the human race, a path to a sustainable future. The more our world looks and functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone." For more info: http://www.biomimicry.net/

A few years ago, I had the good fortune to hear Mohammad Yunus, pioneer of the microlending program, speak in Argentina. Not only did all 6000 of us in the audience fall in love with him, we were awed by the power of his program to help people lift themselves out of poverty. Click here to buy the book.

His book provides a glimpse of this powerful program and the editorial review includes this statement: Yunus's theories work. Grameen Bank has provided 3.8 billion dollars to 2.4 million families in rural Bangladesh. Today, more than 250 institutions in nearly 100 countries operate micro-credit programs based on the Grameen methodology, placing Grameen at the forefront of a burgeoning world movement toward eradicating poverty through micro-lending.

Grameen is profiled by Fast Company in the January issue of Social Capitalist awards.

When discussing innovation and risk-taking in our leadership development programs we regularly ask participants, ”How many of you have ever learned a new game or a new sport?” Invariably every hand in the room goes up. We then ask, “And how many of you got it perfect the first day you played it?” People chuckle. No hands go up. Who ever gets it right the first time?

There was this one time, however, when Urban E. Hilger, Jr. raised his hand and said that on the very first day he went skiing he got it perfect. Naturally we were curious and asked Urban to tell us about the experience. Here’s what he said.

It was the first day of skiing classes. I skied all day long, and I didn’t fall down once. I was so elated; I felt so good. So I skied up to the instructor, and I told him of my great day. You know what the ski instructor said? He told me, “Personally, Urban, I think you had a lousy day.” I was stunned. “What do you mean lousy day? I thought the objective was to stand up on these boards, not fall down.” The ski instructor looked me straight in the eyes and replied, “Urban, if you’re not falling, you’re not learning.”

Urban’s ski instructor understood that if you can stand up on your skis all day long the first time out, you’re only doing what you already know how to do, not pushing yourself to try anything new and difficult. By definition learning is about something you don’t know. Those who do what they already know how to do never learn anything new. Promoting learning requires building in a tolerance for error and a framework for forgiveness. Learning and innovation go hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other. We’ve also discovered that the same thing is true for leadership.

In a series of research studies we conducted — along with Lillas Brown of the University of Saskatchewan — we found that leaders can be differentiated by the range and depth of the learning tactics they employ when facing a new or unfamiliar experience. We measured managers on four different approaches to learning — taking action, feeling, thinking, and accessing others — and we discovered that managers who were more engaged rather than less engaged in each of these learning tactics were also more effective at leading. The more they engaged in learning the better they did at leading. We discovered, in other words, that we could predict that someone would be a more effective leader based on the extent to which they engaged in learning!

This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. It just makes sense that those people who push themselves to learn will do better than those who only dabble in it. Attending one three-day workshop, reading one best-selling book, reflecting only on one incident, or participating in one simulation doesn’t produce great leaders. It doesn’t produce great innovators either. What was somewhat surprising to us, however, was that no one style of learning was more effective than any other at being a more effective leader. Learning to lead seems to be independent of any particular learning style. It doesn’t matter how you learn. What matters is that you do more of whatever learning tactic works best for you. Becoming a better leader is clearly linked to becoming a better learner.

These findings also raise an extremely interesting and mostly unexplored question: Which comes first, learning or leading? Whenever we pursue this question with our clients their hunches are the same as ours. Learning comes first, they say. When people are predisposed to be curious and want to learn something new, they are much more likely to get better at it than those who don’t become fully engaged. When it comes to getting great at leading, or anything for that matter, the axiom is not simply “Just do it.” It’s “Just do more of it!”

Learning is the master skill. When we fully engage in learning — when we throw ourselves whole-heartedly into experimenting, reflecting, reading, or getting coaching – we’re going to experience the thrill of improvement and the taste of success. Less is not more when it comes to learning. More is more. And a word of caution to executives with the red pencils. In these challenging times when we’re faced with the need to innovate, don’t cut the training budget!

Question of the Week: Let's take this great question about learning and leading and see what your experience is. How do you see your leaders learning? What brief example of outstanding learning leading to great leadership? Please respond in the comments section below.

"Every corporate giant says it wants to change.
Few can do it.
Every young company starts out as a natural force for change.
Few can sustain it.
Every organization has people who think they can be agents of
change.
Few can survive it."
-- Charles Fishman, Fast Company magazine,
April-May, 1997 "Change"

I love it when authors spell out their most important message right up front. In John Kotter's book "The Heart of Change," he puts it on page 1 -- here's what he states:

"People change what they do less because they are given analysis that shifts their thinking than because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings."

In talking about organizational change, he emphasizes that the central challenge is changing people's behavior and the way to change behavior is to "influence their feelings." "The heart of change," he continues, "is in the emotions."

So, how do you show a truth? And, what is truth? I thought this topic might stimulate some conversation. Think about change initiatives in your organization. What have you done, or seen done, that was effective in getting people to change their behaviors? Do you agree with the author's point about the value of showing truth over providing analysis? What does that say about the value of facts and factual analysis? And how does Buckminster Fuller's quote fit into this mix?